Jocelyn Bell Burnell

The omission of Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell from the Observer’s 10 best list surprised many readers. The Northern Irish astrophysicist discovered the first radio pulsars as a postgraduate student under the supervision of Antony Hewish, but it was he who shared the 1974 Nobel prize for Physics with Martin Ryle, not Bell Burnell. She claimed in 1977 that she was “not myself upset about it”, and that “it would demean Nobel prizes if they were awarded to research students”. She has since gone on to have an extremely successful academic career: in October 2014 she was elected president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Rosalind Franklin

Another unsung hero not on the list is English chemist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin. She took what scientist JD Bernal called “the most beautiful photographs of [DNA] ever taken”, or what reader J_smudger called “excellent crystallography images of the DNA molecule”. These photos allowed James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins to discover the double helix, for which they won the 1962 Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine. Franklin lost out on the award due to her tragic death aged 37 in 1958, meaning that her contribution to science remained largely unrecognised.

Emmy Noether

According to palindrom, Noether’s contribution to science is “the key to modern physical theory”, but the German mathematician remains so unsung that paulcckeown claims not “more than a few in a thousand on the Clapham Omnibus will have heard of [her]”. Yet those who have heard of her praised her highly – her work in abstract algebra and theoretical physics led Einstein to call her “a creative mathematical genius”, and mathematician Norbert Wiener wrote that she was “the greatest female mathematician who has ever lived”.

Margaret Bastock

AndyHoldcroft suggested the forgotten figure of Margaret Bastock, a British zoologist and geneticist. Although the idea that genes affect behavioural patterns is widely accepted, few people realise that the first evidence for this came from Bastock’s work on the fruit fly. In 1956 she published her study on the mutation called “yellow in Drosophilia”. It didn’t catch the newspapers’ attention, but it did change the course of genetic science.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

American astronomer Leavitt is hardly a household name. Yet her main discovery, the period-luminosity relationship, is one of the most essential standards of measuring the distance between the Earth and various galaxies. Her methodology effectively created a map of the universe: during her career Leavitt mapped out more than 2,400 stars, and Edwin Hubble used her methods to prove the constant expansion of the universe. However, because of institutional sexism during her lifetime, Leavitt never got the public recognition she deserved.

Vera Rubin

Credited with finding evidence of the hypothetical type of invisible mass now known as dark matter, Rubin’s work in the 1960s on the rotation of galaxies fundamentally changed scientists’ understanding of the cosmos. Previously scientists saw the universe as dominated by starlight, yet Rubin changed this to a view directed around “nonluminous mass”. She achieved all of this despite problems accessing academia: she was told not to pursue science at Vassar College by her high school teacher, and, when applying for a graduate degree, that “Princeton does not accept women” in its astronomy programme. Admirably, Rubin remains indifferent to prestige: “Fame is fleeting, my numbers mean more to me than my name. If astronomers are still using my data years from now, that’s my greatest compliment.”

Émilie du Châtelet

LessSure explores the Age of Enlightenment to find the little-known French polymath Émilie du Châtelet. She shared her passion for science with Voltaire, who saw her as “a great man whose only fault was being a woman”. Academic institutions held the same grudge, so du Châtelet used her wealthy background to hire tutors in order to compete with her male contemporaries. Du Châtelet rose to prominence by translating and commenting on Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. With this, du Châtelet contributed to the larger French shift from Cartesian acceptance to a more progressive embracement of Newtonian physics. Yet du Châtelet, for all her work, is still rather unrepresented in the world of science.

Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering

Alec Duncan nominates Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering for their development of the whooping cough vaccine in the late 1930s: “Working on a shoestring budget while employed by the Michigan Health Department their vaccine was enormously successful and saved countless lives, not just in America but around the world.” At a time when whooping cough was killing almost 6,000 American children a year, the pair worked tirelessly to create the vaccine. When funds were low, they brought in Eleanor Roosevelt, and when offices closed for the day, they worked overtime. “Yet,” as Duncan finishes, “almost no one has ever heard of them.”

Mary Fairfax Somerville

Alphagamma thinks that Scottish science writer and polymath Mary Fairfax Somerville deserves an honourable mention for being “the person for whom the term ‘scientist’ was first coined”. As women were often resigned to a domestic role, Somerville was unable to study for a degree, but her self-education and determination resulted in some contemporary recognition for her research into the magnetism of solar rays: she was jointly nominated (along with Caroline Herschel) as the first female member of the Royal Astronomical Society, and Somerville Colllege, Oxford, was named after her in 1879.